Do you know the world’s biggest search engine? Obviously, that’s Google. However, what about world’s second one? Well, that is YouTube with over 30 million visitors per day. It also generates an estimated 92 billion page view per month and about 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute. This provides ample of opportunities to get huge traffic to blogs and websites. These numbers are definitely huge but YouTube is one platform that has been least tapped for generating traffic.

If your video is getting enough views, you can also make a good amount of money from these videos. However, it is important to note that merely uploading a video on YouTube would not suffice the purpose. If you are not a big brand or celebrity, why would people be interested in watching your videos? For this purpose, your YouTube videos need to be SEO optimized so as to increase the viewership.

Source: www.businessblogwriters.com

YouTube Algorithm is different from Google’s algorithm. YouTube takes into consideration many things. It takes into consideration many things like audience retention, video length, keywords in description, title tag information, likes and dislikes, comments, the number of subscribers, and so on. For this reason, we have come up with a comprehensive list of YouTube SEO secrets that can help you increase the viewership.

6 YouTube SEO Secrets

1. Keywords Search

When it comes to SEO, it starts with the research of keywords that works best. The goal is to look for keywords that have YouTube results on the first page of Google. These ‘video keywords’ can help you lift your SEO.

Generally, Google uses the following keywords

Funny video (‘epic wedding fails’)

Tutorials (‘Setting up WordPress’)

Reviews (‘Fan movie review’)

How to (‘how to french braid’)

Fitness or sports related (‘Crunches’)

Suppose you have created a video around a keyword that doesn’t show any video results in Google, in this case, you will get traffic from people searching on Youtube and if you optimize the video keywords, you will also get traffic directly from Google search engine result pages.

You can find the keyword by searching for those keywords in your niche and then analyze if these keywords you searched for have YouTube video results. After you got your video keyword, you should now check if the search volume for that keyword is enough or not. The important thing you need to make sure is that your targeted keyword should have at least 300 searches per month on Google. 300 searches per month are a decent amount of number within YouTube.

With Google Display Planner, you will not only have huge numbers of keywords but you will also get an idea of what are the searched keyword which you can add in your title, description, and tags.

2. Use Keywords in Video Title

The YouTube video title gives an overview of what is inside your video. Therefore, it is important to match your video content with the title of the video to make it user-friendly. For that matter, it is also good for the SEO as per YouTube algorithm. You can give apt title to your videos by these two ways:

I. You can benefit from the search engine auto-complete feature. For instance, if your video is about something which people might search on Google say, braid tutorials, then you can leverage on auto-completion feature of Google. when you will type down few keywords, Google will suggest you to all the related results. These results are the most searched topics around your keywords. You can take up this suggested topic by Google as your video title in order to rank high on Google Search.

II. You can also leverage on YouTube auto-completion feature to have an idea of what could be your video title. For instance, if your keyword is WordPress, when you will type down this keyword on YouTube search bar, you will see results like WordPress tutorial for beginners, WordPress tutorial for beginners step by step, WordPress theme development tutorial, and so on. You can title your video on the basis of these suggestions.

3. Video Description

The description of your YouTube video matter a lot. It is the first 2 to 3 lines that can either pour in views or leave your video amongst spider webs. You should give a short and to the point description which covers the theme of your video and gives viewers an idea of what is going to be inside that video. You can also use the auto-completion keyword phrases as your description in order to get close to the chances of high rankings.

Note: Using long tail keywords for your video description can do wonders since the competition among them is low and this can help your video rank high.

4. Rename your video file

Once you have created and edited the video and is ready to be uploaded on YouTube. But before uploading the video file, it is important to rename your video that contains the keywords so that the search engine finds it easy to crawl. This is because search engines cannot crawl the video content inside and this is why it crucial to rename your video. For instance, change the YouTube video name from random_name.mp4 to your_keyword.mp4. This can help the search engine to index video in order to get a higher ranking.

5. Closed Caption (CC) in Your YouTube

By using the closed caption feature of YouTube, the text over the video will help the viewer to understand the narration in the video. This can be translated into 183 languages. For this, you need to upload the transcript of the video. This is good on many levels since the transcript of the video will contain the text of what is said in the video. The YouTube’s algorithm will automatically convert your voice into the transcript. When you will use CC, it will give a new way to the video to get indexed because of the written keywords.

6. Tags and Keyword Research

Well, this is one of the most important aspects of YouTube Video. You need to take care of the following tips while adding tags to your video:

Listing of Specific Tags

Writing the main keywords first can help your video rank higher since this will put weight as per the algorithms.

Listing of General Tags

Along with the specific tags, you need to write general tags to in order to increase the chances of indexing. However, you need to be sure that the general tags you are putting are relevant to your video and the theme. For instance, if my video is about ‘How to Increase Traffic to Blogs’, you can add general tags like ‘Blogging tips’, ‘Social Media tools’, and similar.

Add Misspells

Including misspells to your tags can help you in increasing viewership. For instance, if you have keywords like Real SEO then you can also put keywords like Real SEO. This can be checked from YouTube analytics and the traffic resources.

Add Singular and Plural Tags

Including singular as well as plural tags can help you increase the chances of high viewership. If your main keyword is ‘Party Dress’, then you can also put ‘Party Dresses’, and you can put keywords separately into two different tags like ‘Party’ and ‘Dress’.

Long Tail Keywords

You can include phrases to your tags. This is because long tail keywords are specific and the competition among long keywords is less.

Conclusion

These are the factors that do affect your YouTube video ranking. However, they are secondary. The primary focus should be on creating an interesting and compelling YouTube videos. For instance, if you are making a tutorial video then your focus should be the target audience and for that, you should prepare the script that targets them. Be sure of asking your viewers to share and like your videos on different social media portals. Other than that, you can also embed your YouTube video within the blog post in order to get more views.

You can have a look at the video below to understand the secrets to Keyword Research…

Now you are all set to be a YouTube star with these YouTube SEO secrets. Tell us how you liked this post and feel free to share your queries, if any.

Sakshi is a content marketer during the day and a reader by night. She writes content sprinkled with a twisted imagination. She has done her graduation in psychology from Delhi University and has an insane love for history.